Guild Wars 2

You went overboard on the nerf in some parts Hrouda. I really enjoyed some of the new mechanics of the fights but…let’s start with a few points:

The rumbling colossus deadliest attack is rendered useless just by staying near an npc. Sure he knocks you around but what’s the huge deal when the bubble is so big that the you would still fall inside.

Kholer summons are weaker than overworld trash mobs making them completely pointless to the fight, same could be said about the ghosts being summoned near Detha traps. I think his spin attack was nerfed a bit too.

The worst offence is that EVERYTHING had his health massively reduced. I understand that damage sponges is a bad thing, but unlike in fractals, dungeons do not have agony attacks. There is nothing here that you should watch out for, and the bosses die so fast, that you wouldn’t even need to pull off your heal button. My team wasn’t even in full zerkers, we were all running support. I assume that bosses/enemies would die in less than 5 sec with a team in full zerkers.

Now an incredibly amazing addition was the ghost eater. A entertaining fight that requires group coordination added with risks that you should watch out for(one hit ooze spit and the deadly ecto ground). Same for the spider, you can’t just facetank and afk anymore, you need to pay attention to what you are doing.

In my opinion, most of the changes made the dungeon far too easy, even more than before if it is even possible to say that. Some parts were improved like i pointed but the rest was very badly done with just number tweaking. And to be honest, i’m scared of what you have in mind for other dungeons, specially Arah. And if there was a place that ever needed a nerf , it isn’t certainly AC but Hotw with the underwater paths. And specially high level fractals(40+) like the dredge carrier part and Uncategorized fractal ettin/flame shaman champion.

That’s really disappointing to hear. I was hoping they would actually stick to making explorable modes into “hard modes.”

I’ll try the new explorable modes tonight and report back with my thoughts too.

I had a similar experience last night when doing the first path of the redone AC.

Health:
A lot of things seemed to have less health; breeders, gravelings, Kholer, Spider, and even the end boss. The little spiders that spawn around the big spider in the beginning, they have more HP and took a little more effort to kill this time around. I think that there might have been a little too much HP taken off from the mobs. I was with a Mesmer friend, and 3 pugs (another Mesmer and 2 Guardians). I’m not sure what everyone was specced, but I play a more supportish Thief, and enemies went down a little too fast IMO. With that said though, some other fights got very interesting.

Spider:
With her adds that have more HP and not knowing about her new attacks, since this was our first run, we actually had to get some downed people back up. Once the little spiders were taken care of though, the fight was relatively easy. The spider seems just as predictable, if not more predictable now. Her new root attack seemed to only target one person at a time and never caught anyone inside her poison fields. Her poison fields are predictable now as there are always 3 in a cone-like pattern. They seem to last longer now, which is good since it limited the size of the playing field. I did notice that I was actually given a little longer to get out of the field before I started accumulating immense amounts of poison like the previous version of the spider dished out. Once we killed her, I was very indifferent about the new changes.

Champion Mobs:
Their new stealth skill is lackluster. They’re still very visible, but now evade all attacks while in that phase. Overall, the changes with this mob seemed like an improvement since its not just an HP bag now, but I feel like there is room for improvement.

Kholer:
My take was that he is more of an endurance fight unless you have a lot of DPS. I pulled him normally down to where the troll sometimes spawns, this time no adds followed partway. Instead he summons them during the fight, which is really nice. Since the new mobs he spawns are really low on HP, they make for decent targets to rally off of in case you get caught in the spin2win attack. We ignored the adds through most of the fight until they started to get out of control. At one point we had like 6-8 and that was the turning point where we had to start focusing them instead of just Kholer. I liked the change to this fight, it felt better than just a ‘learn to dodge’ fight.

Burrows Event:
Not much changed here, the burrows seemed to spawn more enemies, but we still did this successfully on the first attempt. I will give a word of caution, if too many enemies spawn, you’ll start to notice heavy performance decreases. My hardware is listed in the sig, but during this fight I was not always utilizing 100% of my GPU since my CPU couldn’t keep up. Normally the two parts (CPU/GPU) work well together giving a decent game play experience in dungeon runs. However, it seems the additional enemies or other changes have really started taxing my hardware. I run in 1080p with highest settings besides supersampling.

Scepter Pieces:
I’m a Thief, so if there were changes I didn’t notice them since it was still runnable. IE: No change.

Boss:
First off, I knew it was serious time when there weren’t any breeders in the room anymore. It was just the boss by itself. So we engaged and were instantly met by some new attacks. He now has a Jesus ray which does damage and applies stacks of confusion if you face tank it. I got up to 20 stacks of confusion during the fight. If you avoid this attack like you would his normal scream, no biggie. What makes dodging it more difficult now is his army that spawns. He spawns a lot of mobs. I’m not sure they’re all silver tiered, but a lot of them were. They don’t seem to move around much, but they do use their lunge attack that KDs quite often, especially when you don’t take them down. By the end of the fight there were maybe 20 of these adds around and a dead boss. Once you learn to anticipate the lunges and steer clear of the two shouts from the boss, then it turns into an easy fight. Standing still doesn’t seem like an option anymore in this fight.

Overall:
I really liked most of the changes. I’ll prolly go ahead and do the other paths tonight since I heard P2’s boss got much more interesting. I really like the more interactive fights rather than ‘dodge this one bad guy’ which is relatively easy if you have people that can control aggro. 1.5 thumbs up! Keep this going Robert, you’re onto something here!